A "direct quotation" is a record of verbal behavior which depends more explicitly upon a knowledge of the conditions under which the behavior occurred. It is often, however, little more than an acoustic or phonetic transcription which permits the reader to reconstruct relevant properties of the original behavior. The spoken report that someone said It is four o'clock actually reconstructs an instance of verbal behavior. A written report permits the reader to reconstruct it for himself.
A technique which permits the reconstruction of a datum is unusual. Science does not generally resort to models or mimicry; its descriptions of events do not resemble those events. In the field of nonverbal behavior we usually do not report behavior by imitating it. Yet in speaking a language under study the scientist uses mimicry in lieu of the more usual method of description which bears no point-to-point correspondence with the thing described.
No matter how tempting it may be to utilize the special possibility of phonetic transcription or direct quotation to reconstruct the behavior being analyzed, it must be emphasized that from the point of view of scientific method an expression such as It is four o'clock is the name of a response. It is obviously not the response being studied, because that was made by someone else at some other time. It simply resembles that response in point of form. The conditions responsible for the original response may not share anything in common with the conditions responsible for the response on the part of the describing scientist. This practice, called hypostasis, is an anomaly in scientific method. The field of verbal behavior is distinguished by the fact that the names of the things with which it deals are acoustically similar to the things themselves.
As Quine has said, "A quotation is not a description, but a hieroglyph; it designates its object not by describing it in terms of other objects, but by picturing it." Quine is speaking here of the written report of written verbal behavior. In no other science is this possible, because in no other science do names and the things named have similar structures.
B.F Skinner, Verbal Behavior
